O’Reilly: Inside RIA

The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the Decorator design pattern. The Decorator pattern is used to attach additional responsibilities to an object at run time dynamically. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing to extend the functionality of classes in a hierarchical relationship. The Decorator design pattern utilizes an important OOP concept known as the open closed principal. This means that classes are open to extension but closed for modification. The Decorator pattern also uses the concept of composition, another very powerful OOP concept.

Around a year ago I was given the task to create an architecture for a syndicatable video player, capable of playing any video that might be served up by our different products. The first thing I had to do was...

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, enjoy a gentle introduction to the fundamentals of object-oriented programming, including classes, objects, methods, and variables.

Just a quick follow-up to the announcement a few weeks ago about The Lost ActionScript Weekend. Two common questions have been coming in: 1. "Will these things be discounted at all?" A discount code is now in place. Here's the...

This month, O'Reilly and Adobe Developer Library are releasing the 13+-hour-long Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript Weekend, a two-part video series of some heft and ambition, the outcome (or logical extension, actually) of a longer, larger process. The back story may be of interest to some.

I was recently asked what was the point of using base classes for creating custom components, instead of just putting everything in a single class instance? Well, there are several reasons that this is beneficial. Here are just a few.

As we have previously mentioned, Flex 3 makes use of ActionScript 3.0, a powerful object-oriented programming language. Before we dive into the specific syntax used in ActionScript, let's take a look at what makes a language object-oriented in the first place, and the benefits to using and object-oriented language versus a procedural language.